


Tell Me How

by palaces_outofparagraphs



Series: after laughter [1]
Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: 3 years post finale, Anti Ezria, Gen, Heartache, Mental Health Issues, Post series finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, anti ezra, i was sad and heartbroken and furious about the finale, kind of a mess oops, my poor babies are crying, seriously dont read this if you like ezra, so I wrote this, spencer and toby being domestic forever, toby being extremely supportive and taking care of her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 16:49:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11339466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palaces_outofparagraphs/pseuds/palaces_outofparagraphs
Summary: "Some days, she can even send Aria a Snapchat. Most days, though, her hands shake just picking up a phone. Toby says maybe she should just get a flip phone, that in the long run it would be easier on her mental health. But it feels too much losing, and almost eleven years after that first text message, in some ways, Spencer will always be playing the game."





	Tell Me How

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written/published for the PLL fandom before but the finale gave me the usual mix of devastation, joy, and anger. Then I listened to "After Laughter" on repeat and decided to start a series of loosely connected (probably out of order) stories about the girls moving on, healing, and dealing with their trauma and tragedy as realistically as I can make it.

Sometimes, the pain is so bad she cannot breathe.

Most days, she’s okay. There are days she’s better than okays. There are good days, and one or two really, really good days. There are days where the world feels like all windows and no doors, where sunshine is streaming through, Toby’s hand in hers, her last year of law school wringing her brain out to the point too full of knowledge to hold onto any of the past. Days where she wakes up and she knows she’s survived it all, that the worst is behind her, that from here on out, it can  _ only ever  _ get better.

Some days, she can log into Facebook and scroll down her feed without feeling her heart beat harder than when she runs a marathon. Some days, she can even send Aria a Snapchat. Most days, though, her hands shake just picking up a phone.

Toby says maybe she should just get a flip phone, that in the long run it would be easier on her mental health. But it feels too much losing, and almost eleven years after that first text message, in some ways, Spencer will always be playing the game.

The proof of this comes with the bad days. Because there are days where the pain is so bad, she cannot breathe.

There are days where she wakes up, and the whole world is windows, and it’s terrible, because that means there are people watching her. There are days where the whole world is locked doors, or doors that open into solid blank walls. There are days where she’ll stand parked at the mirror for hours with her shirt off, tracing over and over and over again the scar the bullet left in her shoulder. Days where she thinks of an identical girl, with an identical scar, and the man who kissed her once ( _i was sixteen it wasnt my fault i was only sixteen_ _why did they all blame me why why why_ ) who shot a hole in the shoulder of the identical girl with the identical scar.

The identical girl with the identical scar and her mother and Mona, all of whom were never seen again. And they just let it happen. Too many people fall through the cracks in Rosewood, and those were three everyone was happy to let go.

Some days she cannot stop thinking about her mother. On those days, she’ll call her real mother, and talk for hours about nothing, letting her voice seep into her brain, letting it try and pick apart her brain, but she can’t stop thinking about where she might be.

Sometimes Hanna drinks too much and starts talking about Mona, and it’s creepy, but they all sort of let it happen, because God knows none of them are in their right mind anymore. They’re  _ okay  _ and they’re  _ all right  _ and they’re  _ moving on,  _ but none of them are quite right, none of them ever will be. They’re the only ones who really, truly understand that about each other.

William Styron once called his depression  _ a veritable howling tempest in the brain,  _ and somedays the storm is so bad Spencer cannot get out of bed, for days, weeks, months on end. But she does, and she does, and she does, and she does. And no one else really -  _ really -  _ understands what that means except for them. Except for Em and Hanna and Aria. Not even Allison really gets it, even though Spencer will never say so  - maybe the rest of them don’t think so, but Allison wasn’t there. Allison wasn’t in the dollhouse. Allison wasn’t there for that first awful, awful year.

(Toby gets it, too, in the way Toby can see through her soul just by looking into her eyes.)

But she’ll pick up the phone on days like that. The landline feels safer, and they still have one beacuse Toby knows. She knows all their numbers off by heart and the days when she’s home from hours of work and law school lying practically paralyzed on her couch, her brain pounding itself into the wall, calling Aria, or Em, or Hanna, helps in ways the contents of her medicine cabinet and her therapist can’t touch.

“I got out of bed today,” she’ll say into the phone, Aria’s breathing alone on the other end bringing her back to something approaching equilibrium. “It was like literally lifting an eight hundred pound weight from the ground.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

It means almost more from Aria than from the others - almost - because for Aria, in a way, it still hasn’t ended. It took years of therapy and six months of separation, but she had left Ezra, finally, finally, finally, a week shy of the tenth anniversary of Allison’s disappearance - almost a year ago now. Realized that someone who lied as much as Ezra did, someone who would willingly date a sixteen year old, would lie all their life.

Spencer ached for Aria during the darkest days of her divorce. She can’t imagine going through the aftermath without Toby. But she knows, in the deepest parts of her, that they all should’ve encouraged her to go through with it a long, long time ago. 

They were just kids. Traumatized, messed up, broken kids who didn’t have the space to realize how wrong it had been. It had come in bits and pieces, then waves, Aria slowly reaching the place she needed to be to see the man she had married for who he was. The divorce had been slow, and painful, and seemed impossible some days; there were three weeks of Aria sleeping on their couch, Spencer holding her late into the night as she sobbed viscerally from the depths of her chest; endless breakfasts and lunches and days out with Emily, Hanna, and Ali and talking her through it all. 

Spencer would never forget that first phone call, halfway through her second year of law school. Aria had called on her landline at 2 a.m., a sure sign of some kind of panic attack, and when Spencer had stumbled out of bed and mumbled into the receiver, Aria’s voice had come out clear and sharp as day.

_ “I was sixteen years old. I was sixteen, and he was twenty four. He knew. He was my teacher. Spencer, what was I doing?” _

“ _ We were just kids, Aria, _ ” Spencer had said, because she’d been thinking the same thing for the past three months, ever since she had started picking apart the boys who had kissed her in her teens in therapy.  _ “We were just kids.” _

Then,  _ “what do you want to do?” _

_ “I want to leave him. I don’t know how to live without him but I want to leave him. _ ”

So, Aria’s pain had continued in a way the rest of theirs hadn’t. But she had left, and she was a million times better for it, even if in a way, it was all so much harder. And because of that, when Spencer had days where getting out of bed was like lifting up the whole universe, Aria telling her she was proud of her was like balm on the split open wound that was her mind on the worst days.

Some nights, Toby gets the brunt of it. And sometimes that means silence, and Hastings cold, and she hates herself for it but there are nights she retreats inwards and can’t get out. Nights where she can’t talk to anyone. Nights where she can’t trust anyone except herself, where every brush of air feels abrasive, where Toby talking makes her want to scream because of the sound of someone else’s voice. Nights where Toby touches her and she thinks of his hands on a girl who looks just like her. Nights where she curls into a tiny ball and presses her face into the pillow and refuses to speak.

And the next day he’s made her pancakes and serving her orange juice in bed and already phoned her professors that she’s missing the lecture, yes, she’s sick today, she’ll get the notes, thank you so much for understanding. And she’s crying and crying and crying and he’s holding her and gently, but firmly, insisting she finishes her pancakes, and he books for an extra therapy session tomorrow, and they spend the day in bed, him weaving his fingers through her hair, the blinds shut because even the sunshine is abrasive, her whispering through the dark all the worst moments of it.

_ In the dollhouse, there were forty eight full hours once where the buzzer was going off, and the lights were so bright I could see them through my eyelids. I wanted nothing more but to go to bed but it wasn’t possible. Then the buzzer stopped, but it would come back in bursts and starts for the next three days, and for the whole rest of the time in the dollhouse I heard it in my head nonstop. I still hear it in my head sometimes. _

_ Some days I would get home from school and put the blinds down, and lock the door, and lock the door again, and go back and lock it three more times before going up to my room, and then my phone would buzz and it was like she watched me the lock the door five times and then text me.  _

_ I spent five years pretending it didn’t happen, and I had such bad nightmares my brain felt like it was physically banging against the back of my skull, and I just ignored it. _

_ I feel like the bullet wound is still bleeding. Can you check, please, because I think it’s still bleeding. I have dreams all the time that it’s still bleeding. _

At this, he gently pulls down the sleeve of her shirt, running his fingers along her shoulder, tracing the fine scar that will always mar her, not the only one of the bad days that you can see but certainly the most significant. He feathers his fingers over it, and she remembers the pain, and Toby spins it into something softer. Something gentler.

and she breathes. She breathes. She breathes.

Some days, the pain is so bad she cannot breathe. But when the day turns to night, sometimes, Toby can coax her into the kitchen, where he’s always made her favorite dinner. She doesn’t have to talk; he’ll tell her his stories from working with Jason, tell her about the newest kids they’re meeting who are moving on next week, tell her about all the silly mundane boring details of an ordinary life.

In those moments, even though she doesn’t quite have the mental energy to recognize the feeling for what it is, she loves Toby more than she’s ever loved anyone before.

So sometimes the pain is so bad she cannot breathe. It doesn’t happen very often; days where she can’t get out of bed, and less and less as the years trickle on. And then, despite it all, despite everyting, there are good days. Days where she’s with her best friends, and they’re laughing so hard, it’s like maybe it never had to have happened at all.

But of course, it did.

\--

 


End file.
